Embodiments to the present invention relate to an anti-collision warning system for marine vehicle and to an anti-collision analysis method by processing images coming from an omnidirectional optical sensor installed on board a marine vehicle. More particular, embodiments of the present invention apply mainly, but not exclusively, to ships and to naval drones.
In the rest of the description, the marine vehicle considered as an example is a ship.
The risk of collision which is poorly controlled at sea, comes mainly from an insufficiency of the look-out means. In the field of maritime transport, there are 600 collisions a year on average. The consequences of these collisions are often serious for the environment when they involve oil tankers or chemical tankers.
In the field of maritime passenger transport, the ships (ferries, roll on/roll off ships, etc.) are highly vulnerable.
In the field of fishery, there are some 3,000 collisions a year. The number of victims is high due to the small dimensions of the ships.
In the field of yachting, collisions are also quite frequent.
Collisions at sea mainly result from a lack of look-out. A human failure is at the origin of 70 to 90% of accidents, either by insufficient vigilance, or negligence of the officers of watch, or by routine and poor assessment of the risk. The lack of vigilance is often noticed when the ship is in a “priority” situation, in conditions of good visibility. Accidents can also result from a lack of qualification, an ignorance of rules, or even from a total incompetence of the officers of watch. It is also frequent for the number of officers of watch to be insufficient due to a reduction in the crew (maneuvers, maintenance, commercial activity, etc.), resulting in the officers of watch being overworked and overly tired. These accidents can also result from poor use of the radar system.
At present, most commercial ships have a radar system as anti-collision equipment. This system supplies accurate and reliable information, but requires a setting procedure to be rigorously applied in order to be efficiently usable as an anti-collision system. Now, this procedure is often poorly applied.
There are also ARPA-type systems (“Automatic Radar Plotting Aid”) which analyze the signals supplied by a radar. These systems have a high rate of false alarms. The result is that the alarm device associated with the system is often stopped.
An Automatic Identification System (AIS) has also been developed that must equip all high-risk ships (passenger transport, carriage of dangerous goods) from 2010 onwards. This system proves to be very efficient when it is associated with an accurate positioning system such as a GPS (Global Positioning System). However, the AIS does not take into account the traffic of ships that are not equipped with this system and that are much greater in number.
Today, only radar is really taken into account to deal with the risk of collision which lacks redundancy. It is desirable to provide an anti-collision warning system for marine applications having redundancy.